Feminism

Carrie Chapman Catt, America's leading suffragist, helped organize the international suffrage movement in 1902. Feminists from developed nations met regularly to exchange strategies for winning the vote in their countries.

Beyond winning the vote the feminists wanted to mobilize womanpower, worldwide, to prevent or stop wars. In 1915, a year after the First World War began, Catt, Jane Addams and other leading feminists formed the Women's Peace Party. Women, it argued, were "the mother half of humanity." Maternal pacifists said motherhood gave women a unique biological, social, and political viewpoint through their relationship not just to men and children, but also to the nation and the world. They believed that motherhood legitimized and motivated the solidarity of all women in condemning war, and that whereas men had conflicting interests and ambitions, women all over the world shared concern for the creation and preservation of human life. Motherhood thus became a potent symbol for pacifists, as reflected in a popular song of 1915, "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier."

In 1915 Addams and other pacifists joined Henry Ford's venture to plead directly with the belligerents for peace. President Woodrow Wilson, recognizing the influence of the peace movement, presented American entry into the war as a final desperate step to end all wars—then proposed a League of Nations to prevent future wars from starting. America's participation in the war silenced most of the pacifists, except for the socialists who saw further evidence of a capitalist conspiracy to profit from human misery. Addams actively supported the Food Administration's successful efforts to bring housewives' skills to bear on the world food crisis.

The feminist movement in America has largely focused on the domestic legal rights of women. Winning the vote in 1920 was the American feminists' great triumph, but they were not united on what to do next. Male politicians in the early 1920s scrambled to adjust to the new electorate; many supported policies they thought women wanted, such as pacifism, prohibition of alcholic liquors, welfare programs, and expansion of health services and schools. By the decade's end it was clear that women did not comprise a separate voting block, and the politicians turned to other issues.

The most energetic feminist campaigns after suffrage was won promoted world peace. After the war the pacifists reemerged. They had been reinvigorated by getting the vote in most major countries, and by the terrible knowledge that the Great War had failed to solve the world's problems. In the United States they failed to convince the nation to join the League of Nations or the World Court, but both went into operation anyway and attracted support from most feminists.

By 1921, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) founded in 1915 had grown to twenty-two national affiliates. They united for the same goals they sought at home: to emphasize women's unique role as mothers and nurturers; to promote moral reform and fight against prostitution ("white slavery"); and to demand political rights and the pursuit of peace. Some were socialists who wanted to protect poor working class women from exploitation by capitalist employers. The rhetoric of the WILPF referred to women as "mother-hearts," "guardians, nurses & preservers," "Mothers of the Human Race," "carriers of life," "Mothers of the Nations," and "guardians of the new generations." Its members believed nature had made women morally superior to men. They believed in their hearts that their common gender could and would unite women across the world in the cause of peace in a way that transcended narrow national interests.

Feminists in America and Europe redoubled their efforts for peace in the 1920s. They promoted the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which successfully prohibited the use of poison gas and bacteriological weapons. Even more stunning success came in 1928, with the Kellogg-Briand pact that outlawed war as an instrument of national policy. It was ratified by most countries, incorporated into the United Nations Charter in 1945, and is still in effect; it has made formal declared wars between independent countries quite rare.

Pacifist feminism played a major role in the isolationist mood that formed U.S. national policy in the mid and late 1930s. But not all feminism was pacifist. The "realist" feminists controlled important organizations. Alarmed at the rise of ruthless militaristic dictatorships, realists argued that true peace required such threats to be ended. They were especially active against Japan, which launched large-scale invasions of China in the 1930s. Led by novelist Pearl Buck, who romanticized the work of American women missionaries in China, religious public opinion strongly supported military aid to China and deeply distrusted Japan. The WILPF kept to its pacifism, but lost most of its members.

After Pearl Harbor, pacifist sentiments were rarely expressed by feminist leaders. Congresswoman Jeanette Rankin cast the only vote against war with Japan and did not run for reelection. Few women entered politics during the war. Perhaps the most notable new figure was Clare Boothe Luce, a leader in New York City society and culture, who was elected as a conservative Republican to Congress.

What little organized feminism existed was split on the debate over special laws protecting women in the workplace. The laws were on the books, strongly supported by labor unions and liberals (led by Eleanor Roosevelt) on the grounds that women were unable to bargain collectively to protect themselves, and needed the government's help. However, the growing numbers of educated, middle class women helped keep alive the feminist dream of an equal rights amendment to the Constitution that would end the protections, and thus validate the claim that women could be fully independent citizens and workers with exactly the same status as men.

The wartime labor shortage led to the repeal of traditional restrictions against married women holding white collar jobs in offices, stores, banks, and public schools. Millions of factory jobs opened for women, but most were in the munitions industry that everyone realized would shut down when peace arrived. Most of the new women factory workers were required to join unions, but except for some left-wing CIO unions, they were not welcomed by the male leadership. Liberal feminists supported the expansion of social services to the new workers, such as day care centers, but there was no organized effort to guarantee postwar access to blue collar jobs that had traditionally been monopolized by men.

WACS, WAVES, SPARS, Wasps and Women Marines marked a dramatic breakthrough in the role of women as militarized defenders of the nation. Most feminists seemed uncertain of the wisdom of this new development, and few tried to mobilize opinion on their behalf, although by contrast, military nursing won widespread praise. Instead of renewed feminism during the war, there was an intense interest in the nuclear family, as expressed in the Baby Boom. It began in 1941 as both middle class and working class women, black and white, reversed decades-long trends to later marriages and smaller families.

Feminism peaked in the immediate aftermath of World War I, as the grateful nation rewarded women with the vote and turned its attention to women's issues such as pacifism and prohibition. World War II had the opposite effect. Feminism seemed to reach a nadir in 1945 as America prepared to welcome back its male veterans with a celebration of home, family, fertility, and suburbia, with scant regard for women's independent role or independent voice at home or abroad.

Rosie the Riveter; Women and World War I; Women and World War II; Women's Suffrage Movement

Alonso, Harriet Hyman. The Women's Peace Union and the Outlawry of War, 1921–1942. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989.

Foster, Carrie A. The Women and the Warriors: The U.S. Section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, 1915–1946. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995.

Hartmann, Susan M. The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982.

Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri. Changing Differences: Women and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy, 1917–1994. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995.

Rupp, Leila J. Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women's Movement. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.